Multiracism. Alastair Bonnett
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their own schools but there are too many’, he says. Later I learn that the Arabic word for slave, ‘abd’, is still applied to Black Africans in Egypt, an indication of disrespect for the ‘Black south’.
Himachal Pradesh, India (2017)
As the old car grinds up some of gentlest slopes of the Himalayas, I’m hearing plenty about what the Indian army is doing in Indian-occupied Kashmir and the plight of Muslims across India. My guide and driver are both Muslim Kashmiris and have had to come down to Himachal Pradesh to find work. I recall that at the Indian Institute for Advanced Studies, where I’m staying and which sprawls across a vast British colonial mansion in the state capital of Shimla, there is a decided political chill in the air. Many of the young scholars talk about how academic appointments are increasingly in tune with the Hindutva worldview of India’s right-wing ruling party and that they will have to pursue their careers abroad. The car judders to a halt next to a tiny farmstead and a dark pond, in which a fat buffalo slumbers. An old woman wearing a colourful shawl sits cross-legged on the farm porch, a naked child tugging at her knees. My guide and driver jump out and proceed to empty all the rubbish that has accumulated in the car, which turns out to be a lot, in front of her home. Seeing my worried expression they laugh, ‘do not worry, they do not care’. It’s obvious neither man has a high opinion of these farmers. ‘Who are they?’ I ask. ‘No idea!’ my guide says and laughs harder. I make a guess that they are ‘tribal’ people but my guide’s resolute ‘no idea’ lingers with me. Discrimination isn’t based on knowledge but on indifference. But I too am indifferent: I just let it happen, leave the rubbish on the baked mud. Every day, something similar happens. Over one quarter of the population of Himachal Pradesh are Dalits (once called ‘Untouchables’), a group of such low social standing that they are outside of, or rather beneath, India’s caste system. Time and again, when I encounter abject poverty, here or back in the UK, I look away, my pace quickens, my footsteps echoing a familiar refrain, ‘no idea’.
What is Racism?
Racism is defined here as discrimination and inequality that arise from ethnicized and racialized forms of power, supremacism, and essentialism. ‘Supremacism’ is the ideology and practice of asserting that one particular group is inherently superior to others. ‘Essentialism’ reinforces this process by naturalizing difference. Naturalization, as Hall writes, works to produce a ‘representational strategy designed to fix “difference” and thus secure it for ever’, usually by attributing inherent and inherited characteristics to a group of people.45 This also helps explain why one of the characteristic features of racism is its concern with childbirth, population numbers and, more generally, the bodies of women.
A world of multiracism is a world of multiple inequalities and multiple essentializations. The act of turning imputed and/or observed difference, whether cultural or physical, into naturalized hierarchy will be at the centre of my enquiries. However, it is necessary to place another layer of complexity on this landscape, for the language of racism varies geographically. Offering a single, universal, definition of racism is a useful first step but not a destination, especially if it slams the door on understanding the diverse, fluid, and contested nature of the term. Discriminating against an ethno-racial community because of its imputed inherent and inherited characteristics is called racism in some places but not in others. And whilst I define all such discrimination as racism this does not mean that this is the only legitimate, or useful, word to use, still less that other labels should be displaced. In India, for example, ‘communalism’ and ‘casteism’ are often used to depict practices and ideologies that can overlap with what I am calling racism. In Peru ‘cholism’ is sometimes used to similar effect. The world is full of vocabularies of difference and discrimination. Rather than offering a template in which the word ‘racism’, verified by a Western canon of anti-racist scholarship, is stamped on diverse situations, it is necessary to listen and learn from different contexts.
What Law calls the ‘polycentric’ study of racism is a new field and it often exhibits the kind of definitional dilemmas that one might expect from an endeavour that is not only complex but nascent and politically charged.46 Berg and Wendt’s edited collection Racism in the Modern World can be taken as an example. The editors’ claim for the novelty and importance of the book is that it engages with multiple racializations around the world, and more specifically brings to bear ‘new global history’ approaches that challenge ‘Eurocentric interpretations of world history’.47 It is an impressive volume, yet a comparison of some of its chapters suggests the presence of definitional conflict. For example, Braude’s essay, ‘How Racism Arose in Europe and Why It Did Not in the Near East’, wraps itself in knots in order to argue that acts of ethnic violence in the ‘Near East’ have nothing to do with racism. Thus Braude notes that the treatment of Armenians in the ‘Near East’ in the first decades of the last century, during what he calls the Armenian ‘conflict’, ‘cannot be blamed on racism’. He arrives at this conclusion by defining racism in terms of biological ‘hereditarian determinism’ and finding this ideology to be unique to ‘modern Euro-American racism’.48 Yet in the next two chapters this definition and its geographical implications are overturned. First Geulen explains that racism and cultural prejudice can no longer be conceived as discrete traditions: ‘as early as the beginning of the twentieth century’ the idea of race had been ‘transformed and widened’, he tells us, ‘into something much broader than just physiology and bodily appearance’.49 In the following essay, ‘Racism and Genocide’, Barth uses what he calls the Armenian ‘genocide’ as a textbook example of how racist and cultural ideologies can combine to create the conditions for extermination.50 It is instructive that whilst Braude writes of an Armenian ‘conflict’, Barth writes of an Armenian ‘genocide’. It is a difference that reflects each scholar’s framing of racism.
There are still those who seek to root racism firmly and solely in the soil of biological determinism and race ideology. Thus for Banton, racism is ‘the doctrine that a man’s behaviour is determined by stable inherited characteristics deriving from separate racial stocks having distinctive attributes and usually considered to stand to one another in relations of superiority and inferiority’.51 Although this quote is from 1970, and its definition of racism has become rare, the inference that race ideology is the foundation stone, or ultimate type, of racism remains prevalent. Hence, it is necessary to be clear why Banton’s definition is not sustainable. Conceptually it relies on two things: first, the idea that race and ethnicity are clearly distinct and, second, the idea that ‘race ideology’ is a coherent and relatively static body of knowledge. Neither is plausible: the borders between race and ethnicity are inherently hazy and ‘race ideology’ has long been in doubt. Ideologies of race hierarchy, and/or White supremacy, have always been surrounded by critics and contradictions. When Jean Finot, in Le Préjugé des races, published in 1905 (translated into English in 1906), lambasted the ‘falsely conceived science of races’ and described races as ‘outside all reality’ and ‘fictions in our brains’, he was building on a rich tradition of race-scepticism.52 The transition from the narrative of ‘White civilization’ to that of ‘Western civilization’, which occurred in Europe and North America in the early to mid twentieth century, was propelled by the failure and incoherence of the race concept.53 Even intellectuals associated with Nazi ideology were not convinced. Spengler was condescending about racial science: as soon ‘as light is let through it, “race” vanishes suddenly and completely’.54 After the Second World War, the notion that ‘the word race should be banished’ – popularized in We Europeans, first published in 1935 – was given impetus by the association of the idea of race with Nazism and genocide.55 In a series of UNESCO statements and reports ‘the race concept’ was branded a dangerous fallacy.56
Any definition of racism that ties it to a belief in ‘the race concept’ is likely to conclude that racism is a doctrine from a discredited past and, by extension, a residual rather than a living force. It is worthwhile recalling that the term ‘racism’ was a creation of anti-racists. From its first use it has been a tool employed